


Loneliness Can't Kill

by ChuckTaylorUpset



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Gen, minor suicidal idealation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-01
Updated: 2020-09-01
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:13:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26219182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChuckTaylorUpset/pseuds/ChuckTaylorUpset
Summary: Booker had a brother, once.  Once, he had many brothers, but Anton was the only one who was afraid of heights.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 31





	Loneliness Can't Kill

Booker had a brother, once. Once, he had many brothers, but Anton was the only one who was afraid of heights.

He doesn’t remember how the story starts, how everyone found out, what dramatic incident etched that knowledge into the family psyche. Perhaps it happened when he was very little. All he knows is that by the time he was a young boy Anton’s fear of heights was a family injoke well worn through and long ceased being actually funny.

Did Anton want help going to get the old quilts from the attic, it was awfully high up there. Anton needed to stop growing so fast, he would scare himself by growing so tall. On and on like that.

It wasn’t real information. It was an affect. Like a character in a story. A pirate’s hook hand that never hurts or aches on rainy days. A dark shadow from under the bed wasn’t a monster even if he always stepped over it.

One day Booker’s toy had gotten stuck in a tree-- a kite? No-- a ball and Anton had been up in the branches before anyone had thought too seriously about it. Anton’s hand had closed around the ball and he turned to climb back down and froze.

Booker remembers looking up at his brother, and seeing even from the ground the wide whites of his eyes and the rapid flair of his nostrils as Anton’s breath came panicked, fast and shallow.

In that moment the brother he knew all his life surprised him as if he were a stranger.

“Oh,” Booker had thought to himself, dumbly. “He _hates_ it hates it.”

Banishment is like that, if Booker was both his brother and himself. Expecting familiarity and finding a stranger.

He knew that he hated being lonely, but in the relief of everyone making it out alive, of sadness in places he had expected anger, he had no room for fear. And so he had mistaken it an inconsequential nervousness when it was a deep seated existential terror. Mistaken a kitten where there had been a leviathan.

When Andy had told him what his sentence was, he had thought “Oh, this won’t be fun,” but he managed to put on a brave enough face to leave with the last of his little remaining dignity.

And then Booker remembers that he hates being alone. By the end of two months all pretence of dignity was gone. If Andy had come to tell him now, he would have screamed and cried and thrown himself at her feet, would have kissed her shoes and begged. He would have thrown their love for him-- that love that he betrayed-- in their face and begged. He would have used every soft place that he knew of them, every weakness they had managed to keep, and would have dug into them like a thumb into a bruise. He would have spat that Nicky and Joe dishonored themselves.

He would have asked Andy, “You know what it’s like to be alone. Do you want that for me too? You hate me that much?”

He would say to her “You’re dying. I saw you dying. If I go, you might not make it a hundred years. I will never see you again. Didn’t you say we were in this together until the end?”

He would have yelled “A hundred years is so little to you, you who have lived so long. I will come back and I will have spent a third of my life away from you.”

He would have said “Please, please. Don’t leave me. I love you. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Stay. I love you Don’t go.”

He would have said it over and over again, for as long as he needed to.

He thinks these words, fragments of them come in flashes into his thoughts. Before he sleeps. When he is walking out and about. When he is staring with an empty gaze into the bottom of an empty bottle. He hates, hates, hates being alone.

He can feel the absence of them inside his ribs. Like they’re an organ that had been ripped out that he can never regrow.

He buys baklava and throws it up after drinking too much. He rereads Don Quixote, again and again and again, turning the soft edged pages. He wants them to be sharp, he wants the edges to cut his fingers he wants to bleed into the page he wants to feel like he is a part of her love again, of their love, even if it hurts. He goes to art museums and looks at sculptures and into churches, never during a sermon, and he goes to poetry readings and then leaves because they never have the right cadence. He glances at couples in a shallow shadow of love and then looks away.

He dreams of them, like he did the first time his body had ever realized they were apart. That it was immortal, and that it was part of a whole that was missing from him. It’s not the same, he knows. He feels the difference when he still dreams of Quynh, drowning under the sea.

“Nile is having those dreams.” He thinks to himself. He swallows his dry and scratchy throat. He doesn’t know when the last time he spoke was.

If he were still with them, if he hadn’t fucked it all up, he would be comforting Nile, because by now she would realize that the dreams were never going to stop. That they didn’t happen nightly, or at least not always, not so often that the fear would become dull and routine. They would disappear for months and then happen every night for weeks. They would happen twice a week, and then twice a night and then once a month for years.

She would learn what Andy’s face looked like, when Andy saw the traces of that nightmare, and it tore her apart.

He thinks it would be a relief to share those dreams with someone else. To know he shares this pain with Nile. The weight of Quynh’s dreams, the weight of being the baby of the family.

But when he dreams of Quynh all he can feel is how entirely she is alone, crushed under its weight and the ocean’s. She has not spoken to another person in five hundred years.

And then even those dreams stop too.

In a corner of his mind he must know that he was with them once, and that he was still lonely. That he still longed for death like water in a desert-- no-- like water when he is being burned alive. But he is consumed by his loneliness and his loss, and so he never has time to dwell in the truth of that corner of his mind.

When Quynh comes he goes to her and embraces her. He would have gone to her no matter what. If she had been pointing a sword at him, he would have walked on to it. Would have seen if that could fill the place where he is empty.

She embraces him back. She’s spoken maybe a dozen words to him, and he has spoken not at all. And yet they cling to each other, like something he has no comparison for in all his years of life.

Together, they lie on the bed. He’s so tired.

“Thank you,” She says. Her hand traces his face. “Your dreams-- it was a relief. To be dying in a way that left air in my lungs.”

His jaw clicks with the effort to speak. “Don’t leave me.”

“Never,” She says. “I’m tired of being alone. You won’t leave me.”

It’s a statement of truth, not a request.

“We need to find them. The girl, Nile. I need to meet her if I’m to get some proper sleep.”

A moment ago there was nothing Booker wanted more. But he thinks of their eyes alighting on him and then turning away. He thinks of them looking past, not seeing him, pretending or not, and them greeting him instead of a hug and a kiss with silence. He is terrified that he will be in the same room with them and he will still be completely alone.

If it happened-- the only thing that makes him not suicidal is the simple fact that he cannot die.

“I’m so tired.” Her voice breaks. “Five hundred years and no sleep.”

She wouldn’t need to. Death resets everything. Booker has gotten shot drunk and come back sober. But it sounds exhausting, even without the need of sleep.

She sounds more tired than he feels afraid. And he wants to pretend to be someone who is more a family man than a coward, for a change. So when she looks at him and says, “Venice” he says "Okay."

It’s a small sacrifice to make for family.

**Author's Note:**

> The sexy secret title of this fic is "*Britney Spears Voice* My loneliness ain't killing me. I must confess, I am impossible to kill. We are all immortal and it's a miracle."
> 
> Thanks as always to my beta, whose cheering on of my character beats help me beat writers block.
> 
> Don't forget to kudo and comment.


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